The present invention relates to tuning a continuous time linear equalizer circuit in a receiver for electrical and optical signals, such as quadrature amplitude modulation (“QAM”) signals and pulse amplitude modulation (“PAM”) signals. Communication systems are generally composed of a transmitter, a receiver, and a channel. The transmitter generates a signal conveying information, which, after being transmitted over the channel, is received and recovered at the receiver. Channels may be dispersive which means that both time and frequency of a transmitted signal may be dispersed or spread out overtime. To effectively recover information in the transmitted signal, a receiver may be implemented with a CTLE circuit configured to mitigate the effect of the dispersion. The present invention presents a method and apparatus for tuning such a CTLE circuit in a receiver.